Teniers the Younger, David

Antwerp, 1610 - Brussels, 1690

Village Feast

1640 - 1650. Oil on copperplate

Some peasants dance to the sound of a bagpiper in front of a house in what is one of many examples of genre scenes painted by this artist. Teniers based this work on the esthetics and certain compositional schemes by Jan Brueghel “the Elder” (1568-1625), repeating the same idyllic vision of peasant life, which was also omnipresent in Flemish literature at that time. Some of the characters are almost identical to those in other works by this artist. They correspond to certain topics, such as the piper on a barrel, the pair of dancers, the pair of young men, the naughty children, or the drunken figure leaning on the fence. In 1759, Queen Isabel Farnesio acquired this work from the collection of the Marquis of La Ensenada.